Heart Earth

by Ivan Doig

  Fie upon Phoenix, auf Wiedersehen to Alzona Park and specters of escaped Germans. Out there where we at first didn't know joshua from yucca from cholla from ocotillo, the trio of us got up each morning with nothing recognizable around except one another and the weary Ford. Neighbors now consisted of lizards and scorpions. The mountains wavering up from every horizon around Wickenburg looked ashen, dumpy. The highest lump anywhere around was, gruesomely, Vulture Peak. No pelt of sagebrush to soften this country for us, either; saguaro cacti, with their spiky mittens out, stubbled the hills. Where the familiar black-green of Montana's jack-pines would have shadowed, here the bare green blush of paloverde scarcely inflected the gulches—arroyos—and under every other bristling contortion of vegetation, prickly pears crouched like shin-hunting pygmies in ambush. Even the desert birdsounds had a jab to them, the ha ha of a Gambel's quail invisibly derisive in the bush, the yap of a Gila woodpecker scolding us from his cactus penthouse.

  I loved every fang and dagger of it.

  Any bloodline is a carving river and parents are its nearest shores. At the Faulkner Creek ranch I had learned to try out my mother's limits by running as fast as I could down the sharp shale slope of the ridge next to the ranch house. How I ever found it out without cartwheeling myself to multiple fractures is a mystery, but the avalanche angle of that slope was precisely as much plunge as I could handle as a headlong four- and five-year-old. The first time my visiting grandmother saw one of my races with the law of gravity, she refused ever to watch again. Even my father, with his survivor's-eye view from all the times life had banged him up, even he was given pause by those vertical dashes of mine, tyke roaring drunk on momentum. But my mother let me risk. Watched out her kitchen window my every wild downhiller, hugged herself to bruises while doing so, but let me. Because she knew something of what was ahead? Can it have been that clear to her, that reasoned? The way I would grow up, after, was contained in those freefall moments down that shale-bladed slope. In such plunge, if you use your ricochets right, you steal a kind of balance for yourself; you make equilibrium moment by moment because you have to. Amid the people and places I was to live with, I practiced that bouncing equilibrium and carried it on into a life of writing, free-falling through the language. My father's turn at seeing me toward gravitational independence would come. But my mother's came first and it came early, in her determination that I should fly free of the close coddling she'd had as an ill child. At the Faulkner Creek place she turned me loose in that downhill spree. Here in our second Arizona life, she daily set me free into the cactus jungle.

  Where lessons were quick. One pant cuff instantaneously full of fiendish tiny needles and you know not to brush by a prickly pear again.

  The saguaros seemed to welcome me into the desert democracy of light. Morning shadows of several-armed cactus in stretching dance toward Wickenburg, stubby clumps at noon, reversed elongation toward the Hieroglyphic Mountains in honor of evening. Here even I, according to the shadow possibilities of my prowling boy-body and its swoopbrimmed hat, was a hive of wizards.

  And so did the Ford play into my newest seizure of imagination, its exaggerated groundcloud of shade the perfect pantomime companion for the game of Allen-Prescott-and-the-runaway-Terraplane. Allen told it on himself, how his Hudson Terraplane—an old behemoth sedan he had cut the back out of, hybridizing it into a kind of deluxe ranch runabout and carryall—hung up on a low shale bank when he was puttering out to fix fence between his ranch and Faulkner Creek. When he got behind the car with a crowbar, his mighty pry liberated the Terraplane but also flung him to his knees. By the time he could clamber back onto his feet the car was trundling away at a surprising pace. That tale of the Terraplane planing across the terra, Allen in hotfoot pursuit, was tailormade for a lone boy and a suggestible Ford, you just bet it was. In and out of the parked coupe I flung myself, its shadowline and mine the pageant of Allen's frantic chase, a pretend reel of barbwire bucking out and bowling wickedly at his/my shins, mock fence-posts clacketing against each other as they fly out of the bed of the bounding runaway, reenacted dodging of a five-pound nailbox tipping over, the Terraplane/Ford laying a silver trail of spikes.

  The desert, it is said, makes people more absolute. While I kite around among the cacti, my father pegs away at the chore of recuperation, and the indigo of the desert night draws down into my mother's pen.

  Everyone else is in bed but I'm not ready to go just yet, so will spend my time writing you. Pretty chilly tonight. Keeps me busy poking wood in the fire....

  We are all pretty well at present. Charlie is getting along alright or seems to be, anyway. His side is sore yet, and he has to be careful, but that is to be expected....

  This is a good place to rest, & that's what Charlie needs.... I always thought a desert is just nothing, but have changed my mind ... It is really beautiful here, in the desert way....

  Got 2 welcome letters from you yesterday. So glad to hear from you, Wally, and know you're O.K. Was surely too bad about your buddy being lost in that storm. I don't think any of us have a good idea of what you guys have to go through.

  ***

  Logbook of the Ault, March 19, 1945, off Okinawa:

  0814 SIGHTED ENEMY PLANE (JUDY) MAKING SUICIDE DIVE ON FORMATION. PLANE WAS TAKEN UNDER FIRE AND SHOT DOWN BY A.A. FIRE. PLANE FELL OFF PORT BEAM OF USS ESSEX.... OBSERVED USS FRANKLIN AND USS WASP BURNING AT A DISTANCE.

  1318 SIGHTED TWO ENEMY PLANES (ZEKES) MAKING ATTACK ON FORMATION. MANEUVERED AT EMERGENCY TURNS AND SPEEDS. COMBAT AIR PATROL SHOT DOWN ONE DISTANT 5 MILES. OTHER PLANE MADE SUICIDE DIVE ON TASK GROUP AND WAS SHOT DOWN BY ANTIAIRCRAFT FIRE.

  2145 ...COVERING THE WITHDRAWAL OF USS FRANKLIN, BADLY DAMAGED AND IN TOW TO WESTWARD.

  ***

  March, 1991. I am in Wickenburg again, to write this of us. Now as then, a war is on; this time, American planes are bombing the boots off the Iraqis. Yellow ribbons of hasty patriotism blossom on every streetlight, flagpole, porchpost, in contrast to 1945's here and there glimpses of windows showing gold stars of the war dead.

  Compared with Phoenix where an Americanism of another kind, an arterial slum of the dark and poor and addicted, has consumed the Alzona Park housing project without a trace, this town as my mother and father and I met it in World War Two is surprisingly enterable again. Wickenburg then was still mostly burg, with the fancy houses and subdivisions only starting to be poked onto the hills around, but then as now the place banked on the one commodity it knew it had: sun. Basking beside the Hassayampa River composing sonnets for itself—"the wine that is called air" was one trill tried out by the weekly paper while we were there—Wickenburg was likably frank about what it was up to. You didn't need to be the reincarnation of Marco Polo to recognize that the accommodations along the main street, Wickenburg Way, were there to sieve tourists through, while around the corner along Tegner Street ordinary town life was carried on. Guest ranches were a sideline Wickenburg quickly tumbled to; in a historical blink, Indian territory had given way to Dudeland. Signs for trail rides and chuckwagon dining notwithstanding, my parents must have only ever semi-believed that there existed a class of people willing to pay to mimic, for a few tenderbottom hours at a time, the horseback mode that had governed life at Moss Agate and the Doig homestead and Faulkner Creek.

  Requiem for the lariat proletariat. Even then the pools of us were drying up, and we never were many. Maybe cryogenic moments of my parents' existence, museum instances of how she sat small but vivid in the saddle beneath a mountain arch of stone and how he gallantly performed in cattle corral and bronc arena, are the only currency by which Berneta and Charlie Doig mean anything to today's world. But coming again to Wickenburg, I find the inscribing shadows of the desert saying much more of them.

  ***

  In the cabin of then, my father is mending from his surgery day by day. He is also growing jumpy, as he tends to do when he doesn't have work in his hands.

  We have stuck to cabin routine, except when Dad repo
rts in to the Wickenburg doctor once a week. A Sunday ago, Allen Prescott drove out to say good-bye before their trip home to Montana, so it is Allen who was behind the camera, catching a bit of his own shadow on the side of the cabin, for the only Arizona picture of my mother and father and me together. Dad and I with our workaday hats on (his with that jaunty crimp, mine sitting on me flatbrimmed as a lampshade) while my mother, wearing a striped frock and high heels and with her hair fixed, looks like the one doing the Sunday visiting to this bareboard abode.

  Here it is Sun. again, our first visitless week. But even in this pottery landscape we are not as alone as wed assumed. Regular as breakfast, desert cattle like bony Moss Agate cow ghosts plod past the cabin. My parents keep trying to figure out how many acres, how many miles, of the Sonora each gaunt beef has to range across in a day; the things look like they'd eat the eyebrows off you.

  My father and I are on the hoof ourselves each desert dusk. While my mother clears away the supper dishes, he and I take his prescribed daily walk. "That doc's favorite medicine is shoe leather," my father has said more than once.

  Ever since Dad came out of the hospital I have stayed as close to him as a sidecar, because you never know. Now out we go as always along the road to the foot of the big hill and back, far enough to be dutiful without getting silly about it. Cactus garden to the right of us, to the left of us. Wicks of thorn stand especially sharp in the evening desert light, every saguaro spacing itself prudently away from its neighbors' prickles, all the ocotillos in surprise binge of leaves between their devilwhip barbs. The last of sunlight retreats from us up the foothills and then the ashy mountainslopes. The mountains I have understood to be the Higherglyphics, because obviously they are higher.

  "It's going to be a chilly one tonight," my father tastes from the air, and I swear I begin to notice the cool as he is saying it. The feel of existence seems different here from the huge weathers of Montana, the desert temperature instead registering itself degree by degree as if coats of my skin were constantly being added by day and subtracted by evening.

  This evening we have barely turned around to start home to the cabin before the wind comes up, strong as soon as it arrives. Around us the entire desert gallops in the sudden blow, the tops of creosote bushes wobbling, the stiff paloverde and mesquite abruptly restless, dust haze mounting into the air between us and the mountains. Everything up and running except the trudging us. For the first time in my life I can walk as fast as my plunge-ahead father, slowed as he is by the incised soreness in his side.

  "Wouldn't this just frost your ass," my father mutters as we hang on to our hats, although the wind doesn't seem to me that chilly.

  Falling night, the swooping wind, whatever is on my father's mind, all propel us rapidly into the cabin. My mother is not alone.

  "Look who I found," she says in a loving tone.

  The visitor skeptically sizes up my father and me to see whether we constitute fit company for the likes of himself and my mother, and at last gives us a medium welcome by licking his own nose.

  There is a little white slickhaired dog strayed in here today, an old dog, hasn't been too well fed.

  "More like, who found you," my father says in his driest manner. In his stockman life, dogs had been a natural necessity. Cowdogs, sheepdogs, dogs that were merely dogs and barely even that, the Faulkner Creek ranch had boiled with dogs. So my father got along fine with dogs in their place, which was anywhere but in the house. Or as he had to put it constantly in his years with my mother, not-in-the-damn-house.

  Of course I let him in and fed him, you know me.

  No neutrals among us, but I was closest. From the time I was big enough to toddle I possessed a dog of my own, a perfect German shepherd pup who grew up to be a kind of furry gendarme assigned to me as I caromed around next to Faulkner Creek. Pup had lasted until the summer before we embarked to Arizona, when we were living temporarily in White Sulphur Springs. The town had a dog poisoner, some strychninic fiend, and after Pup died in crawling agony before our eyes I was never the same about dogs again. Now I edge up and put in a minority share of petting, but this desert mutt is no Pup.

  My father is on that same theme, pointing out that this specimen amounts to more mooch than pooch. My mother, though, is all but pedigreeing her guest on the spot.

  "There you go, yes," as she scratches his mangy ears, "you just want to be petted and petted, don't you," fully doing so.

  "Berneta,"my father takes his stand. "You're not having that dog with us. We don't need a dog in Arizona."

  "I know," says my mother as if she doesn't know any such thing. "But it's cold out there on that old desert tonight, isn't it, Mooch? Here, up on the chair, up, Mooch." Professional tramp that he is, the mutt obligingly scrabbles onto the seat of a straightback chair and sits with his head turned toward my mother, who immediately pays off in cookies.

  "He gets put back out in the morning," my father tries another declaration. "For good."

  The dog looks at my father, gives a sniff, then arranges himself on the chair for a nap. My mother laughs and gets out her letter paper while my father and I settle at the other end of the kitchen table for our other routine of his recuperation. He and I are using his enforced leisure on a jigsaw puzzle of the Grand Canyon, yielded up by the cabin. (Big one, 500 pieces, my mother records appropriately into the letter. She wisely holds back on helping us except when a piece is so obvious she just can't resist.) Naturally we saw the actual colossus of canyon on our journey from Montana and were properly astonished that the Colorado River, responsible for it all, amounted to a mere brown string of water off in the distance. But whether our own assembling of the Grand Canyon is ever going to catch up with the Colorado's is an open question. The canyon's show of colors, layered as rainbows, lies like chopped-up crayons all over our half of the table. This five-year-old me has the unholy patience of a glacier, which means that my father must contend not only with half a thousand puzzle pieces but with my method of torturously trying them one after another in a single amoebic opening. Also, I keep wanting to know how this piece or that looks in terms of his colorblindness—"But Daddy, what color do you think it looks like?"

  My father chews his lip a lot during our innings at the jigsaw, but he is determined we are going to finish the damned puzzle or know-the-reason-why.

  The dog suddenly wakes up, sits up blinking at us as if indignant at the excessive noise of puzzle pieces being moved. My mother puts down her pen and gives his ears a restorative scratching.

  My father has been eyeing the dog as if pretty sure its next trick will be to pick our pockets. But now Dad cocks his head toward the kitchen wall. "Listen a bit, everybody."

  Grutch.

  The three of us and the dog listen, all right, the very knots in the wall seem to listen.

  Grutch grutch.

  The sound keeps stopping, then furtively grutching again. A scraping on the desert gravel, whatever this is. Working at—digging under the cabin?

  By now my father knows in alarm what—who—this invasion is. And as quick as he knows, my mother and I know. Prisoners of war! More of those German submariners who tunneled out of the Papago Park camp through caliche that the U.S. Army figured was encasing them like vault steel. The SOBs were regular Teutonic badgers.

  My father rises out of his chair into whispered action. "Berneta, get in the other room with Ivan and that—" The dog is already gone, scooted under the bed.

  "No," my mother whispers back with utter firmness. "I'm coming with." The time in the Sixteen country when my father tangled with a bear that was marauding nightly into the sheep, he looked up after having thrust the rifle in the bear's ribs for a desperate fatal shot and found my mother standing on the cutbank just above him, holding a lantern, watching the whole show. Now again, for better or worse, she is adding her ninety-five pounds against the submariners of the desert.

  "Ivan, then, go in the other room," my father directs.

  "But I want to fight
the Ger—"

  "I-tell-ye, get-in-that-other-room!"

  I compromise as far as the doorway to the other room. My father grimly scans the cabin walls, trying to conjure a gunrack and .30–06 rifle out of bare board. GRUTCH, the in-tunneling all but grinds up through the floor.

  My father grabs the only weapon at hand, which is the broom, and eases to the door, my mother closer behind him than his shadow.

  In the lantern light the lone attacker blinks, as startled to see my father and mother as they are by its incursion.

  Then the wandering cow gives a moo and a chew, and goes back to gobbling the potato peelings my mother had dumped in the garbage box, skidding the box bottom across the desert floor with another grutch.

  ***

  My mother and father ribbed each other for days about the cow showdown. Cabin life seemed ready to blossom along with the desert.

  We have learned to like Arizona, so far as the country is concerned, my mother at last is able to tell Wally. Probably not coincidentally, her report on my father is also sunny.

  Charlie is improving every day. I do so hope he can feel good now.

  Meanwhile the issue of the slickhaired dog took care of itself; the next morning after breakfast, the itinerant pooch demanded to be let out and kept on going.

  I still am scooting back and forth from the cabin to the cactus shadow show, fired by my latest chapter of imagination.

  Ivan is busy looking for gold. Every rock he picks up he asks Charlie if it is gold.

  Then the weather turned. That last of winter, late March of 1945, Wickenburg as the world's toasty oasis all of a sudden lacked the element of sunshine. Oh yes, the rains were tinting up the valley of the Hassayampa in rare fashion, as a matter of fact the lushest year since before the war. Everything so green, my mother's pen granted. It wasn't just our outlander imaginations that the saguaro cacti looked more portly every day; they indeed were fattening on the rain, the precious moisture cameled up inside their accordion-style inner works. But gauge it as you will, such a spate of precipitation still amounts to, well, rainy days. The Wickenburg Sun, trying weekly to convince us its masthead name wasn't a fib, resorted to running the words of a faithful annual visitor who claimed that as chilly and rainy as this season was, he still would not trade the north half of Maricopa County (i.e., Phoenix pointedly excluded) for the whole blooming state of California.